


all you’re giving me is friction

by redskyatmorning



Category: Walker (TV 2021)
Genre: Banter, Episode: s01e05 Duke, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gen, Surprise Kissing, Undercover as a Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29917482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redskyatmorning/pseuds/redskyatmorning
Summary: While undercover with Walker as Adriana, Micki’s cover is almost blown, and she has to do something drastic to save the situation before it goes sideways. (Alternate scene for 1x05)
Relationships: Micki Ramirez & Cordell Walker, Micki Ramirez/Cordell Walker, Trey Barnett/Micki Ramirez (Background)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	all you’re giving me is friction

**Author's Note:**

> don’t look at me twitter made me do it!!!! unbeta'd and not well-written (so many adverbs) as it was whacked out in like 30 seconds and barely makes sense so my apologies for all of it. maybe this happened bc i was excited at the prospect of being one of the first writers for a ship ever but whatever it's fine

“It’s funny how Duke never mentioned pulling jobs with you.”

Micki’s heart skips a beat at this, but she’s expecting it, or at least something like it—she’s never been undercover before, they don’t send Troopers undercover, but she knows the theory of it all like the back of her hand. To stay calm and collected is everything right now.

In the dimly lit bar with its sparse, industrial décor, not at all the kind of place she likes to frequent, she starts to feel a bit more like Adriana: the hoops in her ears feeling heavier than what she’s used to, the red lipstick she almost never wears feeling chalky on her lips. Certainly less like Micki, at least, which has an odd sort of thrill to it despite the pressure of the situation tying her stomach into a knot. The lack of air conditioning makes the oppressive Austin heat settle around them like an uninvited guest. Sweat starts to form on her brow. 

“We just keep our business ours, sweetheart,” Micki says casually to the blonde woman questioning her (Twyla Jean something-or-other, romantically involved with “Duke,” she recalls from the case files), over-emphasizing her natural Texas twang.

It seems to work just fine, and she relaxes, her heart settling back into its regular rhythm. The little bit of uncharacteristic recklessness that ended up with her at this table of two outlaws and one jackass partner might not have been a mistake after all, she thinks. _Ramirez, you are to stand down_ was the last directive she got, and she can’t afford to disobey direct orders, not like Walker does so breezily. She’s too young, too green, has way too much on the line – so whatever happens here, she cannot screw it up. She has to make it worth it.

“Yeah, Duke was always our wheelman,” Twyla is saying.

Micki, _stupidly_ , nods, and says “Right. Yeah, so—”

She can feel Walker tense beside her, and remembers that that’s not right—of course that’s not right, she read and re-read all the files—

“Well,” Twyla says, pouncing on this momentary slip-up, “sounds like you haven’t worked many jobs with Duke after all, since if you had you’d know he’s a safebreaker. So who the hell are you, exactly? Some kind of narc?”

Well, shit. She swallows hard, wishing it was a little less _hot_ in here. Walker opens his mouth to say something, but Micki cuts in, thinking fast.

“Just misspoke, is all, but you sound a little mistrusting, Twyla,” she says with a casual grin, trying to project the sort of catty female hostility that she spent her entire adult life trying to avoid exemplifying, even though it makes her stomach turn. “Jealousy ain’t a good look on you, sweetheart. Some men just aren’t that into blondes, it ain’t personal.”

“Jealous?” Twyla says, raising her eyebrows. “Jealous of what?”

“Of this,” says Micki.

She turns to Walker, shaking her hair out a little so that it obscures her face from the view of the others.

Time to go for broke, she thinks.

 _Kiss me,_ she mouths at him. That oughta make this Twyla character mad enough to back off into an entirely different direction, she figures.

Walker’s eyes widen a fraction, his eyebrows raising. The others are still able to see him—no long-hair advantage for him—so he can’t communicate anything back, but he certainly seems reluctant to comply. She fights the urge to roll her eyes, but it’s a fair concern. Her being so much more junior than him—and younger, and a female colleague, and all that. So she does what she has to do.

Grabbing his shirt’s collar, she pulls him forward towards her and sort of violently smashes their lips together. It takes him a split-second to get his bearings, but then he kisses her back—unexpectedly gentle, taking her face in his hands. The aftershave smells vile, his stubble scratching at her face somewhat uncomfortably, but she has to admit (if only to herself, and never to him, on pain of death) that he’s a good kisser. She counts down in her head, _three, two, one_ , _okay, long enough to be realistic_ , and then pulls back.

Some part of her, some animal impulse buried deep in her brain, almost didn’t want it to end—she feels a little dizzied, her heartbeat fluttering. But that’s just biology. Or maybe just Adriana, and how Adriana feels about Duke—nothing to do with Micki, just the Adriana of it all. 

Their faces a few inches apart in the aftermath, Walker looks at her with slightly parted lips, clearly trying to suppress how dumbfounded he is at this course of action for the sake of the undercover operation. She’s never noticed the colour of eyes before—were they always that colour, a steely sort of green-grey-blue?

Shaking it off, she raises her eyebrows at him, tucks her hair behind her ears, and shrugs, as if to say, _well, that certainly happened, didn’t it?_

He gives her a sort of salacious Duke-like smirk, shifting back into character, and makes some sort of wisecrack that Micki doesn’t really hear because her pulse is beating loudly in her ears—just because it was a close call, of course, nothing more than that. He scoots his chair closer to hers so that their arms are touching over the table, she figures to sell the illusion that they’re now apparently lovers on some level. Nobody presses her on her identity after that, but she can feel the blonde woman shooting daggers at her for the rest of the duration of the little rendez-vous. She can’t help but feel self-satisfied at being the subject of her animosity—but that’s not Micki, it’s Adriana, and the whole scenario, her own behaviour included, is just an elaborate fiction. Doesn't mean a thing.

* * *

Walker is so uncharacteristically quiet for the truck ride to the rodeo that Micki looks over at the passenger seat multiple times to ensure that he hasn’t spontaneously died at some point—but he’s still breathing, and not looking particularly perturbed, either. Once she catches him clearly trying to suppress a grin, even though his huge dimples are a dead giveaway as to the fact that something is amusing him. She keeps opening her mouth to say something, but then closing it again. She isn’t exactly embarrassed—in fact, a little proud that the gambit worked without a hitch—but why not relish the rare silences on the job, she figures.

They talk a little bit about Stella, and Trey, and Graves en route, she calls him an unspeakable jackass and he accepts it graciously (as well he should). They don’t talk about what just happened at the bar.

Once they arrive, the pair of them disembark from the truck wordlessly. The sky above is overcast and threatening a warm rainfall soon, the heat from this morning transformed into muggy humidity that makes her hair start to frizz out and her flannel shirt press uncomfortably against her moistened skin. A warm breeze picks up ever so slightly, a welcome respite. Walking towards the barn that houses the big mechanical bull, where Clint and Twyla are waiting for them, she knows they have to talk about it, but she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of bringing it up first—the silence begins to turn awkward.

Micki looks up at him to see that he’s fully grinning, even though he's not looking at her. She hates it. She hates having to crane her neck to so much as look at this giraffe of a man in the eyes. She hates his whole deal right now.

“Shut up,” she says, pre-emptively.

“I didn’t say a _word_ ,” he says incredulously, turning to look at her, which is fair. But any remorse she might have had evaporates as he continues, “But now that you mention it, it _is_ funny that just last week, you didn’t wanna tell me your middle name, and now…” 

“Hey,” she says sternly, grabbing him by the shoulder abruptly so that he stops walking and faces her. “This was an undercover thing, an Adriana-and-Duke thing, okay? Don’t make a _thing_ out of it, it’s not personal.”

“I know! I know, it was just for work,” he says, raising his hands up in mock defence. “Just teasing, Micki, don’t worry about it. Seriously. I've done this before, it's no big deal.”

“Right,” she says, relaxing a little. “It was a completely collegial interaction.”

“Just a regular workplace collaboration,” he agrees.

Micki nods, trying to stifle a smile. “Glad we’re on the same page.”

A beat of silence passes. She notices something on his face and feels heat rushing to hers.

“You, um, you have—” She points in the general direction of his mouth. “You have lipstick on your…”

“Right,” he says, pressing his lips together, his dimples deepening as he fights to remain straight-faced, lest she tell him to shut up over it again (she’s tempted to anyway). “Thanks.”

He rubs at his mouth, partly stained pink with the aftermath of her red lipstick, with the back of his hand as they continue walking down the field in silence for a few moments.

“So, are we dating?” Walker says presently, and Micki almost jumps out of her skin before he clarifies with a wave of his hand, “Duke and Adriana, I mean. Just trying to work out the weird fake love triangle you’ve suddenly put me in.”

She considers this. “Good point. Let's say an old flame you recently got back together with? In between now and when you were last undercover?”

“Sure, sure, that works.” 

Micki is weirdly alert to his presence next to her even though she isn’t looking at him, can hear his breathing, is noticing the sound of his boots making footfalls against the yellowing grass beneath them, can even feel the body heat emanating from him as they walk side-by-side, adding to the sweltering warmth of the afternoon—as if she's been pushed into some sort of strange, hyperaware state. She’s read about undercover work having psychological effects, but she doesn’t think that half an hour of it should be doing this to her. She takes a sideways glance at Walker—well, less sideways and more like a forty-five degree angle, since he’s, like, seven feet tall—he’s looking off somewhere now, seemingly lost in thought.

But since there’s never more than a few minutes of silence with this one, he prods at her again after a few moments, saying, “So, are you gonna tell Trey?”

As soon as he speaks, the hyperawareness goes away immediately, and they’re back into their normal, settled dynamic.

“Are you gonna tell your—” she begins to retort, but the word _wife_ dies on her lips as she realizes partway through the comeback – stupid, anyway, she has no reason to be defensive – that there is exactly no good way to end that sentence. So she stops, takes a millisecond to regroup, and blurts out the next stupidest thing, that at least won’t be actively offensive. “—kids?"

She notices how he notices her hesitation—he looked away the moment that she floundered, his face falling almost imperceptibly, but she's always been more perceptive than most. He must be used to it by now, the inherent awkwardness of someone else not remembering a loss that is so achingly, earth-shatteringly monumental to you: a loss that leaves a smoking crater in your life where a home once was, but that ends up being just a momentarily forgettable piece of information in that someone else’s life. When he looks back at her, there is something a little heavier in his eyes—she notices with an idle curiosity that his eyes aren’t the same steely colour outside as they were inside the bar, shifting to a more hazel-green in the sunlight, and that’s interesting, she thinks, maybe it’s some kind of heterochromia—but he goes with it anyway, as if he thought that’s what she was going to say all along.

“Is that—” He grins again, good-humoured. “Are those relationships really equivalent, do you think?”

She rolls her eyes, but she’s happy that he’s still playing ball, that her faux-pas didn’t make it too uncomfortable.

“Why do you care so much about Trey, anyway?” she says.

What she doesn’t want to tell him is that Trey asks after him with the same alarming frequency—one day, they’re going to be in each other’s company again, especially with Trey now coaching Walker’s daughter at Sacred Heart, and she is not looking forward to being in the middle of whatever this weird, nascent quasi-bromance is that’s going on here.

“He just seems nice!” Walker shrugs, sounding a little defensive. “I don’t want him to not like me, or—or see me as a threat or something because of this, that’s all.”

Micki raises an eyebrow at him. “You’re not a threat.”

When he laughs, it’s teasing, but in a nice way—kind of boyish but sincere, not meant to be arrogant or lecherous. The warm, deep kind of laugh that tugs a genuine smile out of her too, reluctant as she is to give into his stupid jokes. “Not even a little?”

“No,” she insists, and then, “Whatever the opposite of a threat is, that’s what you are.”

“Great, thanks,” he says. “Can you turn back into Adriana real quick? She’s nicer to me.”

“Do you _ever_ shut up?”

“Maybe one day.”

At that, she has to smile again. Part of her doesn't like how easy and—though she doesn’t want to admit it— _fun_ it is to slip into this repartee with him, because she needs to keep it professional, doesn’t want to get too chummy too fast and all that—but it seems like after today that ship has pretty much unequivocally sailed, so what the hell.

“Not counting on it, personally.”

He laughs and holds a hand out as they approach their destination. “Alright, sugar,” he says, affecting Duke’s more emphasized Southern drawl. “Showtime again.”

“Okay, sweetheart,” she says in Adriana’s voice. She grabs onto his hand, big—almost comically larger than hers—and warm and unexpectedly soft, then looks at him in the eyes defiantly, as if daring him to say something about it.

And of course, he does. “Try not to lay one on me again if you can avoid it.”

“I will _literally_ kill you if you say one more word about that.”

“Noted.”

**Author's Note:**

> i’m sorry this fic literally went nowhere but it was kicking around in my head as i watched the last episode of our favourite yeehaw show and i liked, like, one line in this so i’m subjecting it to the world. and turns out that it’s not just a sam winchester thing, i am weirdly compelled to mention the fact that a character played by jared padalecki has dimples at every single available opportunity. it’s called brainrot, look it up.
> 
> it’s only been five episodes so i am trying to get their voices and vibes right but feel free to tell me if i didn’t do it right. one day i want to write them together properly but i feel too bad writing trey out of her life bc he’s a sweetheart so for now we have this. also yes i call him walker bc i dont like the name cordell, fight me


End file.
